Friday, March 20

A test pressing of an Animal Collective release is being auctioned on eBay. This is news? Not usually. But in this case, it's not just any Animal Collective release, it's the long-rumored live box set on the Catsup Plate label. And the auction is for charity.

Playfully titled Animal Crack Box, the 3xLP set gathers live material that was "recorded live to MiniDisc at various locations over the course of the course of the first three years or so of the band." The box set has been talked about for years (including in a recent Pitchfork interview), and now it looks like it's really happening. Catsup Plate, who released Animal Collective's Campfire Songs album, put up the auction to benefit Doctors Without Borders. Here's the story, cut and pasted from the listing:

"We never know what to do with test pressings here at Catsup Plate. Fairly soon after we approve them we have commercial copies of the record, so the test pressing usually go into a box somewhere. Save them for the grandkids or something like that.

For our upcoming 3LP boxed set of live and unreleased Animal Collective music, entitled Animal Crack Box, we've decided to do something a bit more positive with a set of the test pressings and offer them up for auction with 100% of proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, a Nobel Peace Prize winning medical humanitarian organization who do a tremendous job in offering impartial and non-political help to victims of violence, neglect, or catastrophe around the world."

So there you have it. A good cause and a lot of music, but it'll cost you a few bucks. No word yet on a release date for the proper set. Per the auction description, it will be limited to 1,000 copies and will not be sold in record stores.

Thursday, March 19

This Saturday, March 28 at 2pm, local graphic novel advocates GetGraphic present "An Afternoon with Harvey Pekar" at the Central Library Auditorium, 1 Lafayette Square. Best known as the author of the autobiographical American Splendor (later made into a critically acclaimed motion picture), Pekar is a cult legend in the arena of underground comics.

From Wikipedia: Robert Crumb led to the creation of the autobiographical comic book series American Splendor, later adapted as a movie. Crumb and Pekar became friends through their mutual love of jazz records, and Crumb became the first artist to illustrate American Splendor. The comic documents daily life in the aging neighborhoods of Pekar's native Cleveland, where Pekar worked throughout his life (even after gaining fame) as a file clerk in a large Veterans Administration hospital.

American Splendor has been illustrated over the years by some of comics' best talents. Pekar's most well-known and longest-running collaborators include Crumb, Gary Dumm, Greg Budgett, Spain Rodriguez, Joe Zabel, Gerry Shamray, Frank Stack, Mark Zingarelli, and Joe Sacco; while recent years have seen him repeatedly team up with artists like Dean Haspiel and Josh Neufeld. Other notable cartoonists who have worked with Pekar include Jim Woodring, Chester Brown, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, David Collier, Drew Friedman, Ho Che Anderson, Rick Geary, Ed Piskor, Hunt Emerson, Bob Fingerman, and Alex Wald; as well as such unexpected illustrators as Pekar's wife Joyce Brabner and legendary comics writer Alan Moore.

A critically acclaimed film adaptation of American Splendor was released in 2003, directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman.[1] It featured Paul Giamatti as Pekar, as well as appearances by Pekar himself.

GetGraphic want to know what you want to know from Pekar. Submit your questions here.

Since the 1966 publication of The Origin of the Brunists (which won the William Faulkner Award for Best First Novel), renowned novelist, short story writer, and hypertext pioneer Robert Coover has been a one-man fictional tour-de-force, negotiating the elusive boundary between the real and the illusory with intrepid, unerring vision. Described by the New York Times as “one of America’s quirkiest writers, if by ‘quirky’ we mean an unwillingness to abide by ordinary fictional rules,” Coover makes fiction that examines darkly laughable elements of the human experience, drawing upon fairy tales, the history of baseball, religious cults, and perhaps most famously the presidency of Richard Nixon and the Rosenberg trials.

He has played many roles in his many, varied books: author, ringmaster, wizard behind the curtain. Coover’s work relishes mythmaking, with none of the avuncular simplicity that tends to accompany washed-up notions of the surreal that dominate the present moment. In his world, the imagination is perilous and heady, the origin of infinite creation, and therefore the source of all downfall—a place of fetish as much as fantasy. But what is clear above all is that Coover is not so much a master of illusion as its willing servant, lavishing its many secret nooks with an elegant hand and a cheeky slap. His work ethic is outrageous: 20 books in 40 years. He is always on the move.

Like his long list of well-told fictions such as Briar Rose and Pinocchio in Venice, Coover’s most recent novella, Stepmother, gives the infamous fairytale figure new life and a modern edge. Carefully peeling back layers of easy narratives that have conventionally portrayed stepmothers as self-centered and cruel, he instead reveals a powerful woman—trickster and temptress both—who is as loyal as she is full of equivocation; above all, a protector of the women who fill the text: frisky maidens who aren’t willing (or capable) of behaving as they should, even when their missteps get them into trouble they can see coming miles off. In this case, the stepmother’s efforts are wholly directed at saving a daughter who has been accused of castrating the king’s addle-headed son (a crime she did not commit). Though impressive and full of magical powers, the stepmother’s skills prove off the mark; her daughter is executed—drowned as a witch—in a particularly horrifying way. The reader knows it’s coming and wishes it otherwise. But both their fates were written long before the book began: The stepmother’s revenge will certainly be deadly, vile, and deserved in the face of a mother’s incalculable loss.

One of the most renowned American novelists writing today, Robert Coover will take part in a three-day residency at the University at Buffalo, March 25-27, under the auspices of a Morris Visiting Artist Grant. His visit—designed to highlight UB’s long tradition of fostering eminent avant-garde and postmodern fiction writers such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, J.M. Coetzee, Raymond Federman, and Samuel R. Delany—is the signature fiction event of the Spring 2009 season of the Exhibit X Fiction & Prose Reading Series.

Coover’s residency will culminate with a fiction reading at the Albright-Knox Gallery on March 27 at 8pm. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information about Robert Coover’s visit, see the Exhibit X Web site: www.english.buffalo.edu/exhibitx.

Friday, March 13

Each year, Squeaky Wheel offers local artist access residencies to four exceptional local media artists. Chosen artists receive equipment and a small stipend to produce new work that premieres at Squeaky Wheel. This year’s artists, Aimee Buyea, Christine Davis, Thomas Holt and Elizabeth Knipe, have created a diverse selection of media art.

Aimee Buyea’s Re (memories) is an interactive exploration of her past and identity created using hand processed super 8mm film with an accompanying performance. Aimee is a self-proclaimed hoarder- holding on to mementos from my past including tickets stubs, love letters, postcards, bills, post it notes, photos and other ephemera- amassing several boxes collected since middle school. Aimee documented her attempt to let go of the past and live in the moment, processing her experiences through the making of this film-a film that becomes a symbol of memory and a piece of ephemera of its own.

Christine Davis’ Beyond Recognition is a short narrative about choices and how the choices we make ultimately effect our lives.

Tom Holt’s Signals ( Skulls and Candy as Metaphor for Life ) is a short animation about communication and non-communicable information. The video visualizes how and where energy travels. Signals string together surreal and psychedelic clips in a way that is loosely logical. The video is constructed from frame by frame manipulated photos, drawings, and paintings. The audio heavily makes use of a circuit-bent Casio S-K 5.

Elizabeth Knipe’s RoomBionic II is the second in a series of installations featuring an autonomous display system that projects a robotic vacuum cleaner’s interactions with human life and its detritus. In this episode, Squeaky Wheel’s new street-level gallery has been transformed into a studio apartment patrolled by the RoomBionic. The room is clean to the point of sterility and the RoomBionic has little to do but wander around, remembering the way it used to be and projecting memories of piles of clothes, dirty dishes and unmade beds.

The Local Artist Access Residency is for emerging media artists in Buffalo. Artists-in-Residence receive one free workshop, 100 hours of access to our digital and film post-production suites, two days free quipment rental, and a $100 stipend for supplies. The deadline for the 2009 residency is June 16th, 2009. The application is available online at www.squeaky.org/opportunities.

Thursday, March 12

Richard Foreman is universally regarded as one of the great pioneers of the American theater. His two-week visit to Buffalo (March 16-29) with his collaborator, Sophie Haviland can, therefore, be seen as something historic. During their residency at the University at Buffalo, Foreman and Haviland will conduct an intensive theater/film workshop for students in the UB departments of Media Study and Theatre and Dance as part of “The Bridge: An International Art Initiative.” The general public will have an opportunity to see Foreman at an event on March 23.

Known for his non-narrative theater projects, Foreman has been recognized with numerous honors, including multiple Obie Awards (five for Best Play of the Year), and is the director and designer of more than 50 plays.

Begun in 2004, the Bridge Project promotes international art exchange through a collaborative process. Reached by telephone in New York City, Foreman described the Bridge Project as a kind of artistic sharing.

“My collaborator, Sophie Haviland and I, have taken the Bridge Project to nine different countries,” says Foreman. “Buffalo will be the first American city to host the project. We will work with a group of performers and technicians provided by the University. Each participant will create independently shot film in the style of the project, and we hope that they will then use this material to create their own original works, their own short films. The interesting part is that all of the participants will have access to all the footage shot by other participants, so the Buffalo participants will have access to film shot in Portugal, or Australia, or Japan, and so on.”

I ask Foreman to describe “the style of the project.”

“That’s very difficult to say,” he answers candidly. “I’d say it has a quality of ‘presentation,’ of performers looking into the camera. And in every image, a sense that something is about to appear or occur, a strange sense of expectancy.”

Much of Foreman’s work has been done at his own “Ontological-Hysteric Theater,” which he founded in 1968. According to its web site, OHT exists “with the aim of stripping the theater bare of everything but the singular and essential impulse to stage the static tension of interpersonal relations in space. The OHT seeks to produce works that balance a primitive and minimal style with extremely complex and theatrical themes.”

In Buffalo, OHT certainly will find kindred artistic spirits. Most prominent among them is probably Dan Shanahan, founder and artistic director of Torn Space Theatre, who happily acknowledges Foreman’s influence on his own work. Shanahan has made his reputation for large non-narrative theatrical presentations as the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle, the old Central Terminal, and the Ukrainian center on Broadway.

“I think Foreman’s biggest influence on me has been in the way he uses theatrical time in his productions,” says Shanahan. “He analyzes time while he manipulates time, fracturing it, going backward, repeating it. I used it in Architect the most, and also in Area, because in both instances the production confined the characters and took away their autonomy. The production, itself, was an outside force that the characters were living in.”

“There is plenty of experimental work going on here; we have a lot of well-informed people who are connected to the larger theater world. I think the upcoming production of WoyUbu is an example. There’s Alt Theatre, and what’s being done there. There is a lot happening.”

The Foreman piece that resonates most vividly in Shanahan’s memory is My Head Was a Sledgehammer, which he saw at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. In describing the piece, Ben Brantley of the New York Times wrote, “the most recent offering of Mr. Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is to be swept into a dazzlingly self-contained, thoroughly exhilarating universe that seems in the viewing—as does the best of Mr. Foreman’s work—logical, rational and disturbing in the way that individual dreams can be. It is a testament to Mr. Foreman’s hypnotic artistic control that only afterward do you scratch your head and wonder what it was all about.”

The same is often said of Dan Shanahan.

The general public will have an opportunity to interact with Foreman on March 23 at 7pm, when the University at Buffalo Center for the Moving Image (CMI) directed by Emmy Award-winning arts filmmaker Elliot Caplan, UB professor of media study, will host “An Evening with Richard Foreman,” free to the public, in the Market Arcade Theater. Foreman will discuss his work and screen material selected from 25 years of his plays, as well as his last film production in Japan and the UK.

More information on Foreman can be found at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater site: www.ontological.com. Additional information on the Bridge Project is available at www.bridgefilm.com.

The last time I noticed a celebrated indie filmmaker using a heavy dollop of doom metal to soundtrack a movie, it was Harmony Korine using Sleep and Eyehategod in Gummo. The music is easily the best thing about that sensationalistic trainwreck of a movie, with the cinematography a distant second.

Judging by the trailer, Jim Jarmusch's forthcoming The Limits of Control includes the following things: Ghost Dog's best friend as the lead, the ridiculously beautiful Paz de la Huerta never taking off her Weezer glasses, Tilda Swinton wandering around in a white wig and a cowboy hat, Gael Garcia Bernal with a gigantic scar on his face, Sadly Bemused Bill Murray, cinematography from the great Wong Kar-Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle, and "graphic nudity and some language." Based on all available evidence, it is going to rule. And the music might still be the best thing about it.

As the Playlist points out, in the quick flash of credits at the end of the trailer, we see something encouraging: "Music by Boris." And as sunn O))) mastermind Stephen O'Malley wrote on his website last week and the bands' publicist confirms, the soundtrack includes music from Boris by themselves, sunn O))) & Boris together, and Earth.

Jim Jarmusch has a history of using great music in his movies: eerily ringing minimal Neil Young guitar chords in Dead Man, sparsely chilly RZA beats in Ghost Dog. And he knows that titans of drone-metal go with mysterious outlaw movies like champagne and strawberries. He is a smart man.

The Limits of Control gets a limited release on May 22, and I can't wait.

Wednesday, March 11

This is an admirable collection of digitized audio casettes capturing 80s kids playing video games:

"In November of 1982 my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording medium at the time and one wintery day while on our way to the arcade 'Just Fun' in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds in the arcades.

We recorded our video game experiences from 1982 until 1988 in a variety of locations on the east coast. Most of the recordings come from Ithaca, NY, Albany, NY and Ocean City, MD. Other locations include Lancaster, PA, Falmouth, MA, Rehoboth Beach, DE and Key West, FL.

Luckily I stored all fourteen audio tapes in a safe place and rediscovered them when I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house in 1997. In the last several years I digitized these nostalgic recordings to preserve and share them.

Experience the magic and the wonder of the early years of coin-op video games. Hear the classic arcade ambience like you haven't heard it in over a quarter of a century! The blend of several video games being played simultaneously, the kids yelling and the quarters clanking. We will never hear such beautiful chaos quite the same way again...."

According to Pitchfork, "Mono, the Japanese masters of slow-building epic metal, absolutely crush live. They do not need the help of a 22-piece orchestra to melt your eyeballs. But on a May 8 show at the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City, they'll get one anyway. That's right: Mono is the latest of a seemingly unending string of bands to play a show with an orchestra. Who will be next? Crystal Castles? Lil Boosie? Hatebreed? Probably Hatebreed. In other, probably more important news, Temporary Residence will release Hymn to the Immortal Wind, Mono's awesomely titled fifth album, on March 24. Steve Albini produced it, and it includes two different songs with the word snow in their titles."

Mono performed at Soundlab with Eluvium in April 2005 and again in April 2007 with World's End Girlfriend.

BALF QUARRY, an old stone pit just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, represents a central place for Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan, the duo who call themselves Magik Markers, and is the apt title of their forthcoming May Drag City release. Unearthed from the mines of Connecticut in 2001, Magik Markers have been brutalizing audiences with their shattering live appearances and recordings since the first part of this century. They are now living and creating on opposite sides of the country. Elisa Ambrogio recently moved to Seattle from San Francisco and Pete Nolan resides in Brooklyn, but they came together in Elisa's new city to record BALF QUARRY with Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls, Animal Collective, Sir Richard Bishop). BALF QUARRY has moody space in its soul, and on this album you'll find Elisa and Pete locked together, beating it out, listening to and feeling the sound of their earth quake. And slicing through all the atmosphere, Elisa's voice is a spear of light, splashes of mud, and an acid purple flashback. Listening to BALF QUARRY is like immersing yourself in a great horror film, complete with mental dissipation, catharsis for the ears, and the most satisfying psychotic listening experience you'll have this year.

Magik Markers visited Soundlab with Sunburned Hand of the Man as part of its Fall Brawl Tour in 2005. The following footage, shot by John Long, also includes documentation of the opening act, Buffalo noisemakers Caustic Solution.

A huge part of the story of Dischord Records-- still one of the greatest indie labels ever to exist-- is the label's general longstanding aversion to commercialism. Fugazi, for instance, always refused to license their name for T-shirts, which forced kids who still wanted to publicly claim allegiance to the band to spend the 90s walking around in bootleg "This Is Not a Fugazi T-Shirt" T-shirts. (Yeah, I had one.)

So when teenybop mall fashion institution Forever 21 welded the logo of Dischord flagship band Minor Threat onto what looks like Hair Cuttery wall art from 1986 and then slapped it on a shirt, it's a problem. The resulting atrocity, which looks like some bullshit that Jenny Humphrey might design on "Gossip Girl", can no longer be found on the Forever 21 website, and we might have the band themselves to thank for that.

The image of that shirt above comes from the blog You Thought We Wouldn't Notice, who first caught onto the Forever 21 shirt. When Tripwire reported on it, Dischord's Alec Bourgeois gave them this statement:

"This is an unauthorized shirt and it is still unclear whether the shirt was produced by Forever 21 or if it is a bootleg that they just happen to carry. Either way the members of Minor Threat are looking into it and Forever 21 will be asked to stop selling it.

"In the beginning, Minor Threat did not license anything and any shirts you saw were screened by band member Jeff Nelson. But Jeff stopped screening shirts and over the years the band members realized that the shirts were going to be made with or without their permission, so they may as well authorize a couple friendly printers in order to better control the quality, content and revenue.

"The band and the label tend to deal with bootleg shirts on a case by case basis, acknowledging the vast difference between kids screening shirts for friends and professional printing studios screening shirts for profit. Obviously this absurd Forever 21 shirt falls under the 'unacceptable' category."

This isn't the first time Dischord has had to deal with Minor Threat-related copyright infringement. In 2005, Nike launched a skateboarding tour called Major Threat. On their poster, they used an almost exact copy of the image that originally appeared on the first Minor Threat 7". After the campaign pissed off enough people, Nike pulled the poster and apologized.

However, Bourgeois downplays any connection between the Nike case and the Forever 21 one. He tells Pitchfork, "It's apples and oranges. Minor Threat shirts get bootlegged all the time and, as is the case with all bootlegs, it's a simple case of selling something under the false pretense that it is band approved and that the band will see some of the revenue. In the Nike example they were attempting to hijack Minor Threat imagery in order to link themselves to the band's legacy as a means to sell something completely unrelated to the band or the label."

So, small potatoes, I guess. In any case, the offending Minor Threat shirt is now gone from the Forever 21 website. Bourgeois doesn't know if the band or the label were involved in their removal. "I just know that the band was making some calls," he says.

But if you really need to get a piece of strident hardcore agitprop band merch at Forever 21, this Public Enemy shirt is still available."

Minor Threat and Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye seems to visit Soundlab every two years with his new band The Evens. We hope to see him again soon!

The Buffalo Small Press Book Fair is a regional one day event that brings booksellers, authors, bookmakers, zinesters, small presses, artists, poets, and other cultural workers (and enthusiasts) together in a venue where they can share ideas, showcase their art, and peddle their wares.

The 3rd Annual Buffalo Small Press Book Fair will be held on March 21, 2009 at Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, 453 Porter Avenue, Buffalo, NY. 12pm-6pm. 716.2894338. info@buffalosmallpress.org"

Monday, March 9

WoyUbu: An Intermedia Mash-Up is a collaborative production involving the Intermedia Performance Studio (IPS), experimental performance troupe the Real Dream Cabaret, and the Department of Computer Science at Canisius College.

This performance and interactive installation invites audiences to watch or play as we upload Georg Buchner's prescient unfinished crime drama (begun in 1836), Woyzeck, and Alfred Jarry's perverse 1896 fantasy, Ubu Roi, to the digital world using virtual reality, performing robots, and surveillance technology.

Mash them together, and you have WoyUbu, a play performed in separate but adjoining spaces, mediated through projections and video feeds. Individual audience members have a choice: either to watch Woyzeck's crime drama as it plays out in live action and projection, while having little say in the events. Or, to venture to the other side of the wall, the interactive digital dream realm of Ubu, where low-resolution surveillance cameras and video game controls send feedback to and from Woyzeck's grim reality.

Will you watch . . . or PLAY?

Fridays and Saturdays 8PM March 13-28 IPSpace - 1716 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14209$10 General Admission $5 for seniors and studentsTickets and Information at WOYUBU.org, 1.716.568.4855 or email tickets@woyubu.org

Saturday, March 7

I have been trying for some time to track down a recording from the mid-1990s. A couple of Russian-born conceptual artists had determined, via a poll of listeners, what the most unappealing kinds of music were -- then created a piece embodying all of them. For example, people hate songs about holidays, choirs, and kids singing. So there was a passage where a children's chorus singing about Labor Day.

My efforts to Google it kept failing, and it started to seem like something I might have imagined. And now, out of the blue, here comes Phil Ford to prove that it was no hallucination.

He quotes an account of how the sonic parameters were selected:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

Well damn....it turns out I'm one of them.

Hiphop tuba plus a soprano rapping about the Old West -- what's not to like?

Friday, March 6

In this amusing article from The Morning News, Joshua Allen riffs on the need for economy in songcraft, and in the process determines the formula for pop perfection:

I schedule 35 minutes a day for recreation. That’s all I need to refresh myself from the rigors of punching holes through the guts of this world. Recreation typically consists of lifting something heavy or posting a new sonnet to my blog. But sometimes I want to unwind with a fine carafe of Popov and some good tunes on the hi-fi. I yearn to—in the words of Boston—lose myself in a familiar song, close my eyes, and slip awaaaaaaaaaaaay.

Here’s the problem: “More Than a Feeling” is four minutes and 47 fucking seconds long. I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. That’s, like, one-seventh of my recreation right there.

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Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

Morton Feldman

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"In 1962, 3 seminal actions conspired to change Buffalo's cultural destiny in the 20th Century. The Albright Art Museum added Knox to its name and hundreds of post-war masterworks to its collection; the private University of Buffalo, absorbed into the public SUNY network, flooded its halls with the best and brightest of contemporary artists, writers and musicians; and The Buffalo Philharmonic, seeking a maestro who would infuse its programming with youthful charisma, hired Lukas Foss, a “wunderkind” pianist and composer whose recent embrace of the avant-garde promised a sharp break from his predecessors’ traditional repertories.

"Under Foss’s direction, the Philharmonic quickly gained an international reputation for meeting head-on the challenges of contemporary new music, which typically required classically-trained musicians to explore unconventional techniques such as “preparing” a piano by stuffing its strings with random objects, or manipulating contact microphones to generate electronic feedback.

"Soon the BPO was among the most adventurous major orchestras in the world, boasting multiple world premiers; releasing recordings of compositions by John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and more; performing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Momente and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition on TV ; and embracing a rigorous touring schedule that brought them to Carnegie Hall for the first time in its history.

"'Can this be Buffalo?' Life magazine asked on the occasion of 1968’s Second Festival of the Arts Today, a multi-disciplinary celebration of contemporary experimentation that spotlighted the BPO, UB’s arts departments and the Albright-Knox, and featured a staggering array of visiting participants (among the muscians: Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Cage, Henri Pousseur, Xenakis and LaMonte Young). Life continued: 'Buffalo exploded in an avant-garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York.'

"National acclaim was not without precedent during this period. Time magazine expressed similar disbelief when covering the first Festival of the Arts in 1965, calling it 'perhaps the most all-encompassing, hip, with-it, avant-garde presentation in the U.S. to date.'"

--Craig Reynolds, from "Could This Be Buffalo? 40 Years of Experimental Music in Buffalo" (Buffalo Spree, May/June 2005)

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"Those years—1965-1973—were the American High Sixties. The Vietnam War was in overdrive through most of the period; the U.S. economy was fat and bloody; academic imperialism was as popular as the political kind. Among Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s ambitions was to establish major university centers at each end and the middle of the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway (Stony Brook, Albany, Buffalo) as a tiara for the Empire State’s 57-campus university system. SUNY/Buffalo therefore was given virtual carte blanche to pirate professors away from other universities and build buildings for them to teach in. At one dizzy point in its planning, Gordoh Bunshaft’s proposed new campus complex for the school was reported to be the largest single architectural project in the world, after Brasilia. Eighty percent of the populous English department I joined had been hired within the preceding two years, as additions to the original staff, so numerous were our illustrious immigrants from raided faculties, troubled marriages, and more straitlaced life-styles, we came to call ourselves proudly the Ellis Island of Academia. The somewhat shabby older buildings and hastily built new ones, all jam-packed and about to be abandoned, reinforced that image.

"The politically active among our faculty and students had their own ambitions for the place: the Berkeley of the East. They wanted no part of Mr. Gunshaft’s suburban New Jerusalem rising from filled-in marshland north of the city ('All great cultures,' my new colleague Leslie Fiedler remarked, 'are built on marshes'). In some humors, as when our government lied with more than usual egregiousness about its war, they wanted little enough of the old campus, either. They struck and trashed; then the police and National Guard struck and trashed them. Mace and peppergas wafted through the academic groves; the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchism were literally waved at English Department faculty-student meetings, which—a sight as astonishing to me as those flags—were attended by hundreds, like an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading with harmonium and Tibetan finger-cymbals.

"Altogether a stimulating place to work through those troubled years: Pop Art popping at the Albright-Knox Museum; strange new music from Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and their electronic colleagues; dope as ubiquitous as martinis at faculty dinner parties; polluted Lake Erie flushing over Niagara Falls ('the toilet bowl of America,' our Ontario friends called it); and, across the Peace Bridge, endless Canada, to which hosts of our young men fled as their counterparts had done in other of our national convulsions, and from which Professor McLuhan expounded the limitations, indeed the obsolescence, of the printed word in our electronic culture."

—John Barth, introduction to "The Literature of Exhaustion," from The Friday Book (1984)

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"During a period when there was not yet any university which was explicitly devoted to media art, at the same time as making its theoretical analysis a component of the curriculum, Gerald O'Grady founded the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973. The entire spectrum of media art—ranging from photographic images to slide installations, from music to film and video performances, from film to film installations, from videotape to video environments, and from computer graphics to interactive installations—was investigated, made a reality, and taught about in the 1970s and 80s, by the structuralist avant-garde film makers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits; the documentary film maker James Blue; and the legendary video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, as well as Peter Weibel—all of whom have subsequently been canonized. In the course of this process, media's role in society [especially that of television] and their participatory possibilities were recognized and used for artistic, and also partly politically democratic, projects. All Buffalo faculty members were not only practicing artists, but also capable of theoretically accompanying the development of and issues around their media, in lectures, essays, and publications. The Department of Media Study's significance for the media era is therefore comparable to that of other historical art schools such as the Bauhaus, WChUTEMAS in Moscow, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The title MindFrames indicates that during this time [the 1970s and 80s] and in this place [Buffalo], a frame of reference for media art was established. During that period, masterpieces were produced—from perceptual issues to machine aesthetics, from word games to mathematical structures—which provided the horizon and set the standards for media discourse's visual codes."

"When Robert Longo and Charles Clough, together with a loose collection of like-minded friends, turned a former ice house into an artist-run alternative space in Buffalo, New York in 1974, they were well aware that similar organizations were springing up all over the United States and Canada. But they could not have known that within ten years, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center would be herladed in the art press as "the birthplace of post-modernism," with a reputation for presenting challenging work by artists, mediamakers, performers, musicians, and writers like Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Bloom, Eric Bogosian, Jonathan Borfsky, Lester Bowie, Glenn Branca, Chris Burden, Yoshiko Chume, Tony Conrad, Robert Creeley, Nancy Dwyer, Karen Finley, Eric Fischl, Philip Glass, Mike Glier, Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, John Greyson, Group Material, Holly Hughes, Robert Irwin, Isaac Julien, Mike Kelley, Komar & Melamid, Robbie McCauley, Tim Miller, Joseph Nechvatal, Tony Oursler, Rachel Rosenthal, David Salle, Andres Serrano, Paul Sharits, Cindy Sherman, Michael Snow, Sun Ra, David Wojnarowicz, and Michael Zwack (among literally thousands of others), often early in their careers."

"I arrived in Buffalo just shortly after Hallwalls got started and also, an organization that's now gone the way of so many Buffalo institutions, Media Study/Buffalo, and it was an exciting time because of the gush of Rockefeller-inspired state financing for culture. Of course, the idea was that culture money would keep the Left busy and prevent any of that nastiness Rocky had witnessed in the sixties, and it worked to some extent. Now that all of that has been nipped in the bud, it's easier to see that the culture money really didn't sink too deep into the local population. And the result is that nowadays Hallwalls is really bringing in people in big numbers with a somewhat different kind of fare...

"One of the things that Buffalo has preserved, in all of us here, is a feeling of being real, and in fact we call it the City of No Illusions and make a dead cliche out of that by repeating it so often but it's really true. We have everybody here: we've got geniuses and fools, we've got successes and failures––and people who think they are successes but aren't––and we have such a powerful set of ethnic mixes and hatreds that we really stand as a mirror to the country. In the mean-time, we're always bringing outsiders in and discharging ourselves into the rest of the country like some kind of uh, well I don't want to say toxic waste [laughs] . . . like some kind of additive––an additive. And I find Buffalo people everywhere I go! It's astonishing how they wind up in just the right places, whether it's The Kitchen . . . or The Cabaret . . . whether it's a CEO or a uh, comeback musician. And we, in some ways, manage to preserve . . . somehow, this mix that we have is like a preservative that prevents any of us from really going too far in one direction or another. We have aspirations but we don't sacrifice them on the altar of success too much. We run out and make money and have our success but we don't give up our ideals. And so, I guess that this is one of the things that makes Buffalo, for me, a real American laboratory.

"Now I want to turn around and face your question head–on as a media academic: I think Buffalo's demography is one of its great assets. We're full of people who are overqualified, people who will pay attention and who hate their jobs. We may be at each other's throats sometimes––black versus white, suburbs versus urban, adults versus children, the blue versus white collar and so forth but somewhere in all of this, in each part of this, there's a sense of pride and identity which gives me hope that each aspect of the community authorizes its own cultural identity and, sure enough, we can explore all kinds of different directions in music and art and writing and commerce and for that matter, pet shows and tractor-pulls and last but not least, football teams. I'm just bringing all of this up because I think it's fascinating that even the most unusual cultural objects in Buffalo find their own level at some point and the person who lives next door is as likely to be a jewel thief or a symphony oboe player as they are to be an office worker or a street worker."

--Tony Conrad, from "The Basta! Interview" (Basta!, 1998)

Craig,

Your long article on Beckett, Buffalo and Maximillian inspired me to do my first visual piece since late '96. And I'll sell it to you for $8,000 out of my studio or $16,000 from my dealer/gallery in Venice:

Most people think of Venice's heyday as somewhere between the end of the fourteenth and the end of the sixteenth centuries. Between 1600 & 1797 (the fall of the Republic), Venice consisted primarily of pimps, gamblers, whores, politicians, thieves . . . and artists. No glory, just misery. And the artists were visionary liars––if only there existed a Venice such as they portrayed it! Napoleon––and later, the Austrians––justified conquering Venice by emphasizing the low degree of moral fiber consistent with its being a capital-driven society––just as in America the rust-belt stigma justifies ignoring older industrial, commerce-driven cities like Buffalo––or worse, conquering them with corporate "sophistications" like chain stores. The similarities between the 2 cities do not end there: originally, the prestige associated with Venice's heyday stemmed from its strategic––and ultimately accidental––location, which made it an ideal east-west sea-port, very much like Buffalo in its time. Further, peopled with sea-merchants and governed by commerce, with a constant influx of foreigners arriving from east and west, Venice's importance declined when in 1497 Vasco da Gama's newly discovered sea-route to the east (around Africa's Cape of Good Hope) rendered the city obsolete––just as the Welland Canal sealed Buffalo's fate at the apex of its prominence. As Venice had done over three hundred years before, Buffalo soon fell into the hands of artists and thieves. Unfortunately, now Venice is the cultural center of the 3 richest regions in the world; however, as the rest of N. Italty is embracing succession or autonomy, the city of Venice remains firmly to the left, having just re-elected a mayor who is endorsed by all of Italty's major Socialist and Communist parties.

***

This fall working at the Guggenheim I was required to give a presentation to the faculty and other interns on whatever topic I desired. Knowing only that I did not want to follow the paths of my European peers, whose ground-breaking formal analyses of Kandinsky and Cubism nearly drove me to fire a pistol indiscriminately into an unsuspecting crowd, I decided on Fluxus (certainly you know about it, but if not, I tell you, it's more Dada than Dada and is all about destruction of construction, and of art and medium––it was perfect because I was researching the movement when I got Basta!. What you wrote about Buffalo living its own death and the artist's role in confronting the silence associated with this death made perfect sense to me; thus I have named this activity Buffluxus (or Neo-Fluxus, or Neo-Neo-Dada [as Fluxus is the most Dada of Neo-Dada]).

5 Propositions for the New Neo-Dada (Buffluxus)

1. Find a building about to be destroyed (in Buffalo, simply close your eyes and point). Sign your name to it (after all, you are the artist!) moments before it is to crash to the ground.

"It's true, Anyone can be a Dadaist [or do Fluxus], but even preconception is ephemeral. I'm part of a generation of true Dadaists."

2. Sign your name to everyone listed as "terminal" at the E.R.

3. Mom and Dad are better Buffluxusists that you or I.

4. I've said the word "Buffluxus" several times already and now it's beginning to mean something.

5. The Movement is now over.

---Kevin Reynolds, personal letter (published in Basta! 1997)

"Murder the Word (“A Multi-Media Celebration of the Unreal”) [conceived of by Craig Reynolds in collaboration with Michael Bauman and Betsy Frazer, at the suggestion of Jason Pfaff], developed into a series of multi-media events (“An All-Over Hypertextual Environment”) that attempted to actualize Basta!’s proposals for fun and funds. The event soon transcended its initial “benefit” function, providing an annual locus for hundreds of “experimental” and boundary-pushing musicians, DJs, poets, visual, video, sound and performance artists. The basic premise was to create temporary “all-over” audio-visual environments awash in hyper-media information chaos, textural drift and ritual noise—that is, to meet dead on the promise of collapse predicted for the turn of the millennium."--CR

"The Soundlab series at Big Orbit Gallery [overseen by Executive Director Sean Donaher, and directed by CR, at the suggestion of Gallery Associate Leah Rico, in 2001] grew out of the need to unpack the annual avant-garde holiday and spread its contents over the course of a year. In the beginning, the programming was defined by meta-presentation—investigations of the act of presentation--and ultimately, the employment of oblique strategies reminiscent of the larger conceptual structure of Murder the Word. The earliest Soundlab Series events, the first of which was an “all-over ambient noise” environment celebrating the release of what would turn out to be the last issue of Basta!, were homespun and experimental, activating conceptual blueprints whose actual outcomes were largely unforseeable (as opposed to the presentation of “rehearsed” works, or suites of music by touring bands)."--CR

"The first dedicated Soundlab space was established in 2001 [by CR-- featuring programming overseen by SD--in collaboration with Betsy Frazer, and with significant help by Michael Bauman, LR, Aaron Miller, Ben O'Brien, John Long and others] on the first floor of the building where the last Murder the Word was thrown. "Dedicated to the music, media and performance of Big Orbit Gallery," Soundlab "references club culture in order to collapse traditional presentation methods, but challenges the contemporary entertainment status quo through its dedication to unconventional, experimental, genre-elusive and avant-garde work.""--CR

"In 2003, the Soundlab program once again relocated, this time to its current home, in the basement vaults of the historic Dun Building [venue established by CR and SD in collaboration with MB and BF, and with the help of many volunteers]. Reconsidering avant-garde practice in the era of post-millenial spectacle, Soundlab hopes to advance strategies that promote action--artistically, the production of music, media and performance--as essential to authetically engaging absence (the Buffalo dilemma) and the deafening silence of modern media noise. It's also a good place to have fun."--CR